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Posts Tagged ‘aging’

I just loved this book of essays about getting older, written by a Zen Buddhist American woman in her mid-sixties (my age). Susan Moon is direct, honest, and funny. She writes about the challenges of aging (physical deterioration, memory loss, loneliness…) as well as its joys (human relationships, grandchildren…). She writes from a Buddhist perspective, about her changing body and mind, her mother, her friendships, her self-doubts.

I suppose that most people under sixty would not appreciate this book, although reading it might give them the gift of an older person’s perspective on life, which would not be a bad thing.

Some favorite quotes:

My mind, like my bladder, is shrinking with age so that it doesn’t hold as much at once.

In a way, it adds interest to life to have these small problems to work on. Taking care of oneself becomes a more intricate project and sharpens one’s problem-solving skills. My knees talk to me, and I have to respond. The old bones provide a kind of companionship. It’s not really me who needs things like handrails and hiking poles, it’s my knees; I make these arrangements for them, because we’re family.

It’s not my fault when I have a senior moment any more than it was my fault when my hair turned gray. I’m just a human being, after all. I’ve had a lifetime of junior moments, when one word follows another in logical–and boring–succession, when each action leads to the next appropriate action. For countless years, I have remembered to bring the pencil with me when I go downstairs to use the pencil sharpener. I think I’ve earned the right to break free from the imprisonment of sequential thinking. A senior moment is a stop sign on the road of life.

Gradually, without noticing when it happened, I seem to have let go of trying [to find a mate]. It’s a big relief, I can tell you, not to be scanning the horizon for a spiritually minded socially engaged emotionally intelligent senior bachelor every time I leave the house.

The main thing is, I’m not separate, I only think I am. I’m one of the jewel-like nodes in Indra’s Net, that vast spiderweb of the universe. I’m not a thing at all, I’m an intersection where filaments connect. Pluck me out and the whole thing falls apart, like a knitted shawl unraveling from one dropped stitch. The universe holds me and the universe needs me. No way is the universe going to leave me for a younger woman.

I think of time as the landscape I’m traveling through on a train, and the train is my life. I can only see what’s outside the window. Yesterday was Naperville, Illinois; today is Grand Junction, Colorado; tomorrow will be Sparks, Nevada. I just see the piece that’s framed by the train window, but it’s all there at once, all those places, the whole continent.